Apple Pencil and text editing – a new frontier?

I don't yet use an iPad Pro (w/Pencil) on a daily basis, but I will take delivery of one soon; the experiment will begin. But already I feel sure that, while the iPad Pro may be useful in many ways, in one key aspect for me it will doubtless far short. And that is with text editing.

I'm a journalist and writer and what this means is that I edit text as much or even more than I write text. A cursor operated by mouse or trackpad, and a keyboard with arrow keys, are indisputably the most powerful computer-based text editing tools we've seen so far. Changes can be made instantly, or tracked; we can visualise deletions; add comments in the margins; insert new text at any point in the body of a document; jump across a sentence, paragraph or a whole page with just a couple of modified keystrokes. The keyboard-and-pointer Mac gives us unparalleled power to edit text.

But equally powerful – though wildly different in conception, and execution – is the classic combination of paper-and-pencil. We can't immediately change the text on a page of paper; but we can scribble, strike-through, cross-out, add lines, etc, all in just the time it takes to flip paper and write by hand.

Now, I know that Pages (and Word?) support markup with Apple Pencil. I know that the iPad Pro keyboard allows text navigation via the arrow and Command keys. And we've all seen the new copy-paste gestures in iPadOS 13. But I feel like there is still a missing trick – using the Apple Pencil not only for markup but for direct text editing and navigation.

Imagine striking-through text in Pages or Word with an Apple Pencil, and for the software to register that as a deletion under track-changes. Imagine jumping the cursor to a point in the text by tapping the pencil, and then scribbling marginalia, and/or then typing text through the keyboard. And imagine any changes made through Apple Pencil being registered in a transportable format – so that when a Pages or Word document are opened on a Mac or a PC everything from deletions to additions to comments then obey the desktop-format conventions.

I think my descriptions here are limiting the idea – but it seems obvious to me that there is much untapped potential in the Apple Pencil to be used as a dynamic text-editing tool in word processing apps.

Office has great pen support on Windows, seems like a logical step for them to take on iOS. Especially considering that these days Microsoft is all about doing their best effort on whatever platform the product is on, even if it's not Windows. I wouldn't say "imminently", but it's something I would suspect is coming.

Yes – I hear you. I’ve never used a Newton, though I think I played with one for a few minutes in the 1990s. But I’ve seen the Newton documentary and I feel you: this kind of tool needs to exist. The iPad Pro has that potential; if they wanted it, Apple could make it into a true successor to the Newton and the DynaBook. We may even already be on that road. The trouble with this Pencil vision is that I don’t think it’s been popularised – it’s one of those things users don’t yet know they want.

I was hoping to use a Pencil in combination with Keynote to show slides and then write on them, like it was a super whiteboard or something. It doesn't work that way, so far as I can tell. I will try the PDF route, but not having natively in the app (in presentation mode) seems like a missed opportunity to me.

I was hoping to use a Pencil in combination with Keynote to show slides and then write on them, like it was a super whiteboard or something. It doesn't work that way, so far as I can tell. I will try the PDF route, but not having natively in the app (in presentation mode) seems like a missed opportunity to me.

laudunum buddy this has literally been described (though with a different app) in the iPad tipz thread.

I was hoping to use a Pencil in combination with Keynote to show slides and then write on them, like it was a super whiteboard or something. It doesn't work that way, so far as I can tell. I will try the PDF route, but not having natively in the app (in presentation mode) seems like a missed opportunity to me.

laudunum buddy this has literally been described (though with a different app) in the iPad tipz thread.

S.

True, I read a version of a similar workflow elsewhere. My wish, however, is that this functionality be part of Keynote so I don't need yet another app -- and it's not clear to me if you have to have both an iPad and a Mac in the same room. I just want to walk in with one device! (At the university where I teach, we have a number of classrooms which have HDMI hookups already in the room, so you can walk in with your portable and do whatever. A number of these rooms also have whiteboards, and if you want to show some slides, then do some talking and drawing, and then show some slides, then ... it's up/down with the screen and on/off with the projector.)

I don't entirely mind exporting a Keynote presentation as a PDF, but if I could keep everything in Keynote, that would be even better. Doceri looks cool enough, and I'll check it out, but as much as I loved the look and movement of Prezi, I tend not to create content on someone else's platform where my content is kinda locked in.

Does that make sense? I'm working on pandas dataframe at the moment, and I don't exactly have a firm grip on language (or thinking) at present.

I was hoping to use a Pencil in combination with Keynote to show slides and then write on them, like it was a super whiteboard or something. It doesn't work that way, so far as I can tell. I will try the PDF route, but not having natively in the app (in presentation mode) seems like a missed opportunity to me.

laudunum buddy this has literally been described (though with a different app) in the iPad tipz thread.

S.

True, I read a version of a similar workflow elsewhere. My wish, however, is that this functionality be part of Keynote so I don't need yet another app -- and it's not clear to me if you have to have both an iPad and a Mac in the same room. I just want to walk in with one device! (At the university where I teach, we have a number of classrooms which have HDMI hookups already in the room, so you can walk in with your portable and do whatever. A number of these rooms also have whiteboards, and if you want to show some slides, then do some talking and drawing, and then show some slides, then ... it's up/down with the screen and on/off with the projector.)

I don't entirely mind exporting a Keynote presentation as a PDF, but if I could keep everything in Keynote, that would be even better. Doceri looks cool enough, and I'll check it out, but as much as I loved the look and movement of Prezi, I tend not to create content on someone else's platform where my content is kinda locked in.

Does that make sense? I'm working on pandas dataframe at the moment, and I don't exactly have a firm grip on language (or thinking) at present.